Drawing upon surviving maps, and practices and processes of surveying and mapmaking, this book presents a comprehensive history of scientific surveying in order to shape scholarly understandings of scientific cultures in its many complexities. It focuses on the region of Assam, and examines how northeastern India was ordered into a neat frontier through cartographic representations on maps and atlases. It argues that colonial ideas and theories of visualising Assam – which did not always necessarily translate into practice – were made possible through the Survey of India’s unconventional and ad-hoc mechanisms of field-practices, often seen through customised adaptation to Assam’s unique topography.